Comments by "silat13" (@silat13) on "Rand Paul's Campaign Is Imploding, And He's A Mess" video.
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el80ne When I was in High School we read some of her books. That was in the early 60's. They did not make sense to me then or now.
Got a couple funnies for you.
Ayn L Rand Reviews Children’s Movies
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”
An industrious young woman neglects to charge for her housekeeping services and is rightly exploited for her naïveté. She dies without ever having sought her own happiness as the highest moral aim. I did not finish watching this movie, finding it impossible to sympathize with the main character. —No stars.
“Bambi”
The biggest and the strongest are the fittest to rule. This is the way things have always been. —Four stars.
“Old Yeller”
A farm animal ceases to be useful and is disposed of humanely. A valuable lesson for children. —Four stars.
“Lady and the Tramp”
A ridiculous movie. What could a restaurant owner possibly have to gain by giving away a perfectly good meal to dogs, when he could sell it at a reasonable price to human beings? A dog cannot pay for spaghetti, and payment is the only honest way to express appreciation for value. —One star.
“101 Dalmatians”
A wealthy woman attempts to do her impoverished school friend Anita a favor by purchasing some of her many dogs and putting them to sensible use. Her generosity is repulsed at every turn, and Anita foolishly and irresponsibly begins acquiring even more animals, none of which are used to make a practical winter coat. Altruism is pointless. So are dogs. A cat is a far more sensible pet. A cat is objectively valuable. —No stars.
“Mary Poppins”
A woman takes a job with a wealthy family without asking for money in exchange for her services. An absurd premise. Later, her employer leaves a lucrative career in banking in order to play a children’s game. —No stars.
“Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory”
An excellent movie. The obviously unfit individuals are winnowed out through a series of entrepreneurial tests and, in the end, an enterprising young boy receives a factory. I believe more movies should be made about enterprising young boys who are given factories. —Three and a half stars. (Half a star off for the grandparents, who are sponging off the labor of Charlie and his mother. If Grandpa Joe can dance, Grandpa Joe can work.)
“How The Grinch Stole Christmas”
Taxation is also a form of theft. In a truly free society, citizens should pay only as much as they are willing for the services they require. —Three stars.
“Charlotte’s Web”
A farmer allows sentimental drawings by a bug to prevail over economic necessity and refuses to value his prize pig, Wilbur, by processing and selling him on the open market. Presumably, the pig still dies eventually, only without profiting his owners. The farmer’s daughter, Fern, learns nothing except how to become an unsuccessful farmer. There is a rat in this movie. I quite liked the rat. He knew how to extract value from his environment. —Two stars.
“The Muppets Take Manhattan”
This movie was a disappointment. The Muppets do not take Manhattan at all. They merely visit it. —No stars.
“Beauty and the Beast”
A young woman rejects a financially independent hunter in favor of an unemployed nobleman who lives off of the labor of others. Also, there are no trains in this movie. I did like the talking clock, who attempted to take pride in his work despite constant attacks on his dignity by the candlestick. The candlestick did not take his job seriously. —Two stars.
“The Little Mermaid”
A young woman achieves all of her goals. She finds an object of value—in this case, a broad-chested brunet man—and sacrifices as much as she believes necessary (the ocean, talking, etc.) in order to acquire him. —Four stars.
“Babe”
Another pig farmer fails to do his job. —No stars.
“Toy Story”
At last, a full-length feature about the inherent value of possessions. —Four stars.
“Garfield”
I liked this movie. Cats are inherently valuable animals. It makes sense that there should be a movie about a cat. I could demonstrate the objective value of a cat, if I wanted to. —Four stars.
“Up”
A man refuses to sell his home to serve the convenience of others, which is his right as an American citizen. He meets a dog, which neither finds food for him nor protects him from danger. He would have been better off with a cat. There are no cats in this movie. —Two stars.
“Frozen”
An exceptional woman foolishly allows her mooching family members to keep her from ruling a kingdom of ice in perfect solitude. She is forced to use her unique powers to provide free entertainment for peasants, without compensation. I liked the snowman, when he sang. —One star.
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el80ne Racism, theocracy and libertarianism go hand in hand, when from a philosophical point of view they should have little to do with one another. The negative effects of the lack of a central government are so obvious in developing countries that wherever the social order fails as in Somalia, it must have been due to bad religion, or the defect of having been born to an inferior race.
Ron Paul fans must reassure themselves that such things would never happen to white, Christian folk. They're immune from the Somali problem by virtue being of different stock and different values, you see.
The "Somalia" argument is a sore spot for libertarians. They either fall back on the old line of race and religious prejudice I outlined, or they claim that it isn't true Libertarianism, you see: it's anarchy. True Libertarians believe in just enough government to protect private property and personal safety; without those protections, they argue, anarchy ensues.
The only problem for libertarians is that they cannot point to even a single current or historical example of a government that functions as they imagine it should. They have no concrete, real world examples, so they ply their arguments in a theoretical construct.
Each and every example of places with little centralized government is dismissed by libertarians as an anarchistic situation, not a "true" Libertarianism. It's the "no true Scotman" fallacy, Ron Paul edition. The hellish situation in Afghanistan is blamed on 30 years of war and tribal anarchy, rather than the lack of a central government. The case of Somalia is blamed again on war, on American intervention, and again on tribal anarchy. Historical examples of feudalism arising in the absence of a centralized state, or the repeated Dark Ages that arise after civilization collapses, are dismissed as either irrelevant to the modern world or invalid because of war and anarchy. The fact that corruption and the Mafia are more prevalent in southern Italy where tax collection and central government are weaker than in the North, is again dismissed as a cultural or anarchistic issue. It's always the same argument.
Libertarianism, in other words, is infallible. Wherever it fails, it does so because the people weren't ready for it, or there was too much violence to allow it to work, or because the government wasn't powerful enough to protect people from harm.
Libertarians fail to realize that there has never been--and never will be--a government that functions according to their principles because it runs entirely contrary to human nature.
As any libertarian understands when it comes to statist authoritarians, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. When you decentralize and remove the modern welfare state, leaving only essentially a glorified police force in charge to protect private property and personal safety, one of two things happens:
1) The central police force turns into a right-wing military dictatorship invested in stamping out all leftist thinking, then appropriating the country's wealth for themselves and their friends (e.g., Chile under Pinochet);
or
2) All central authority and protection break down completely as power localizes into the hands of local criminals and feudal/tribal warlords with little compunction about abusing and terrorizing the local population (e.g., feudal France, Afghanistan, Somalia, western Pakistan, etc.) As I said before:
Feudalism is the inevitable historical consequence of the decline of a centralized cosmopolitan state. That's because the exercise of power by those in a position to wield it does not end with the elimination of federal authority: rather, it simply shifts to those of a more localized, more tyrannical, and less democratically accountable bent.
Urban street gangs in under-policed neighborhoods, mafias in under-taxed countries, and groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon invariably step in to fill the void where government fails. When the Japanese government wasn't able to adequately help the population after the earthquake and tsunami, the yakuza helpfully stepped in to do it for them. The devolution of local authority and taxation into the hands of criminal groups willing to provide a safety net in exchange for their cut of the action is the invariable pre-feudal result of the breakdown of the government-backed safety net. It happens every single time. The people will want a safety net where utter chaos doesn't prevent it: they'll either get it from an accountable governmental authority, or from a non-governmental authority of shadowy legality. Both kinds of authority will levy their own form of taxation, be it legal and official, or part of an illegal protection scheme.
In its own way, the "No True Libertarianism" argument is very similar to the "No True Communism" of those on the far left, who argue that the fault of Communism lies not with the idea, but with the practice--despite the fact that no successful large-scale Communism has ever been implemented in the world. Neither ideology can fail its adherents. They can only be failed by imperfect practitioners.
Both ideologies run counter to human nature for the same reason: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The people with the money and guns will always abuse the people who don't have the money and guns, unless there are multiple levels of checks, balances, and legal and economic protections to ensure the existence of a middle-class tax base with a stake in maintaining a stable society. The modern welfare state didn't arise by accident or conspiracy: it evolved as a means of avoiding the failures of other models.
Libertarianism is a philosophical game played by those without either enough real-world experience of localized, non-state-actor tyranny, or enough awareness of history to understand the immaturity of their political worldview. Unfortunately, the harm they do to the social safety net and to governmental checks and balances is all too real, and all too damaging.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/29/1049619/-Why-Libertarianism-Doesn-t-Work
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el80ne Civil Rights and Libertarians
Opposition to the Civil Rights Act is supposedly based on how libertarians believe that the Non-Aggression-Principle is sacred (except of course when defending property rights). The problem is that libertarian precepts sometimes look good on paper (depending on how gullible you are), but they are simply unrealistic. The libertarian take on the Civil Rights Act tends to either ignore or dismiss outright issue like history, prevailing social attitudes (regarding certain groups that rightfully ought to be protected if one consults history), the brutal & unethical consequences and implications of not having protected groups, and the accumulation of quantifiable injustice that occurs when masses of people are allowed to act on their own prejudices. That is the problem with libertarian unreasonable adherence to fundamentally unrealistic principles.
Are you "infringing" on a person's "right" to freely discriminate? Yes, but history has demonstrated before that the good of doing such a thing greatly outweighs the "bad" of infringing on bigots' rights.
Besides, this country offers bigots ample leeway to act on their attitudes even currently in the private sector-- certainly much more so than in other developed/Western/Industrialized nations . If you don't like a job applicant's ethnic background, all your company has to say is that the individual did not fit into your company's workplace environment/culture. Private businesses always reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Even with the Civil Rights Act in place, housing discrimination (e.g., redlining) was still allowed to go on. Imagine how much worse things would be today with OUT it in place, with all the "libertarians" having their way on the issue.
None of this, of curse, gets into how, if one does happen to harbor bigoted attitudes, this libertarian position does offer people a very convenient refuge.
To be a libertarian-pusher, you'd either have to be naive enough to really believe in such a thing, or a wealthy cynic who just wants to promote ideas that obfuscate the terms of discussion and/or policies that you know will end-up hurting people in the long run while you benefit.
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